This one is in North Carolina, and I think it deserves some special attention. This ain’t just a Creation “Museum” — it’s a Christian bookstore, an antique tool collection, and a taxidermy hall of fame!
Ken Ham should be squirming with envy.
Note the fawning tone the television announcer takes — it’s clear he thinks this concatenation of kitsch is simply wonderful.
Answers in Genesis explains how you can use a “Biblical framework” to figure something out. In this case, they use the Bible to… derive the existence of Atlantis and peg the time of its sinking to somewhere between 1818BC and 600BC.
The phrase that comes to mind is “Garbage in, garbage out.”
Texans can do things right, I tell you: they just booted Don McLeroy off the state board of education in the primary election. Yay!
It’s a step forward, although the rest of the board is still a muddled mix of creationist loons and cautious conservatives.
It’s good to know that in the ecosystem of inanity, we have village idiots, like Ken Ham, and itinerant idiots, like Sean Meek. Meek has created something called The Traveling Creation Museum as part of his life’s work of making people stupider.
The Traveling Creation Museum is available to come to your location. It has exhibits on the days of Creation, the Flood, the Ice Age, dinosaurs and much more. It shows how the real scientific and historical information supports the Genesis account of Creation.The Museum includes many authentic antiquities from the ancient world and reveals in a dramatic and visual manner the grandeur of God’s creation.
That’s all the detail I’ve been able to find on this thing. There doesn’t seem to be a formal schedule for it, I haven’t found any photographs, I’m a little disappointed. I suspect that what it actually is is that if you give him a call, a creepy Christian guy in a safari suit will show up in his van (or maybe, if I indulge in a flight of grandiose fantasy, it’s something as elegant as a Winnebago) and hector kids about how the Bible is completely and literally true in every word. He’s one of those guys, the ones who insist that the Bible must be accepted as the ultimate authority on everything, which means that the Earth must be 6000 years old, something the Bible doesn’t say.
Attempting to compromise the Bible is like pulling a thread on a cheap sweater; it all begins to unravel. Suddenly all the verses that speak of God’s mercy and forgiveness begin to look self-serving and manipulative. All of the Bible would be built on lies and deception. As important as the question of Creation is, it is not the central question. The central is, and always has been, is the Bible really God’s Word?
No.
Wow, that was easy.
Anyway, if anyone wants to check this thing out, we do have a confirmed destination: it will be in Gastonia, NC, in the First Wesleyan Church, across the street from the Dairy Queen. That’s good news — it’s not like someone would have to travel to this obscure little place to see a craptacular display of a god-wallopers ignorance, you could also get yourself an ice cream cone.
Proud Canadians have written in to tell me that they beat us: they have their own ignorant ass with plans for a traveling museum.
OK, OK, you beat us at hockey. Do you have to get so danged competitive about everything now?
The Duggars are that creepy family paraded about on The Learning Channel — the ones with the swarm of kids. It’s a horrifying show, but in this episode, the nightmare is compounded by the fact that they visit the Creation “Museum” and even get a personal guided tour from freakishly dead-eyed Ken Ham. Only watch it if you like to torment yourself.
One other reason to watch it: they show enough of the “Museum” that you really don’t need to go there.
Do pity these poor kids, too.
Oh, this is a cunning ploy to foil pharyngulation: a whole page of creationist polls, thrown up like chaff to distract us so we won’t slam any one of them too hard. You can still play, though, and skew them some. Here are three:
Do you believe dinosaurs and humans ever lived at the same time?
No
45,21%
Yes
39,92%
Probably not
7,84%
They probably have.
7,03%
How old is the earth?
Billions of years
47,01%
Around 6000 years
35,26%
Closer to 10,000 years
8,40%
Millions of years
7,56%
Close to 100,000 years
1,77%
Do you believe that humans were created or that they evolved?
I believe humans were created as humans in the beginning by God.
51,56%
I believe humans evolved from ape-like creatures with no intervention by God.
33,09%
I believe something different from all the options above.
9,44%
I believe God created humans and then they evolved.
5,91%
Right now it looks like a third to half of all respondents picked the stupidest answer possible, which is quite an accomplishment.
I’m getting a flood of email from Israel. As one correspondent explains, Israel maintains three kinds of state-supported schools: one kind for the ultra-orthodox, because the state has always fostered freakishly fanatical ignorance among the lunatic subset, and these schools teach no science at all; a fully secular system, particularly in higher education, because Jews have also had a strong scholarly tradition, and Israel depends on material strategies for its survival, and these schools teach science very well; and a general intermediate kind of school where religion may be taught but science is also taught. That situation may be in peril now. Gavriel Avital, the chief scientist in the education ministry, has made a few statements that show he is a lunatic.
“If textbooks state explicitly that human beings’ origins are to be found with monkeys, I would want students to pursue and grapple with other opinions. There are many people who don’t believe the evolutionary account is correct,” Avital said yesterday.
“There are those for whom evolution is a religion and are unwilling to hear about anything else. Part of my responsibility, in light of my position with the Education Ministry, is to examine textbooks and curricula,” he said. “If they keep writing in textbooks that the Earth is growing warmer because of carbon dioxide emissions, I’ll insist that isn’t the case.”
Nobody has explained to me yet how such a putz got appointed in the first place, but this isn’t a good sign. The man is a freakin’ incompetent.
Prior to his appointment, Avital said in a video interview with Machon Meir, a religious-Zionist Jewish studies institute, “Another scientific field that is problematic is biology, or life and environmental sciences. When your doctrine is based on Darwin’s theory of evolution and its implications, you are standing on unreliable foundations – that is, there is no God, there was only something primeval, and then there are certain random developments which led to the apex of all creation, the human being.
“Today I am pleased that more and more scientists engaged in pure science, rather than being employed in the name of an ideology, are reaching the conclusion that the world must have a master. Nothing is given to chance,” he said. “These are my opinions and I won’t deny them just because I was appointed to an Education Ministry position.”
The chorus of outrage is already building among sensible scientists in Israel.
Yehoshua Kolodny, a professor emeritus at Hebrew University who won the Israel Prize for his contributions to the study of earth science, responded furiously to these statements yesterday.
“Denying evolution is like denying science itself,” Kolodny said.
“Evolution is not a theory, but an observation point that anyone can see. Perhaps Dr. Avital did not notice that throughout history, various species existed and then became extinct. In 2009, the entire world celebrated 200 years since the birth of Darwin and 150 years since the publication of his book ‘The Origin of the Species,'” he added.
“When a top scientist ignores these things, it’s a cultural calamity,” Kolodny said. “There are no disagreements among scientists regarding evolution. Catholics and Protestants long ago ended their war against evolution, and Avital is for all intents and purposes joining the radical fringe of evangelicals in the United States.”
I have to disagree with Dr Kolodny on one thing: Catholics and Protestants are still fighting over evolution in the US. Apparently some Jews are simply joining them now, parroting the same drivel that had its origins in fundamentalist/evangelical Protestantism.
Still, let’s add a few international voices to that chorus. Write to tluna@education.gov.il and politely suggest that Gavriel Avital is clearly not the right man for the job.
The freethought community is grieving at the loss of Helen Kagin, and Ken Ham, petty whiner that he is, has decided to complain about her obituary.
We found it unfortunate that someone took this sad time as an opportunity to take a shot at the Creation Museum in an obituary. And sad, too, that some of the information was not correct. There were not hundreds at the protest rally outside the gates of the Creation Museum when it opened–we counted perhaps 70 people. Also it was not so “peaceful,” considering that the protestors brought in a loud rock band to disrupt our opening day, and also rented a plane to circle and buzz the museum for a few hours, dragging a banner stating: “Thou shalt not lie.”
She was one of Ken Ham’s many enemies, so I could understand a little fist-shaking…but this is so piously hypocritical. He finds it unfortunate that someone would snipe at the idiocy of his “museum” in an obituary, but doesn’t seem to find it at all unfortunate that he has chosen to snipe at the deceased.
And that’s without even the standard Christian snideness of opening up his complaint by pointing out how sad it is when someone dies…but at least Christians get to live forever in the “arms of the Lord and Savior”! I’ve run into more than a few Christians like that, who find their joy in the misfortune of others amplifed by the fact that not only are they dead, but they’re burning in hell, unlike his or her prospects.
Although I do find some personal satisfaction that Ken Ham is seething in this life over the contempt the Kagins have frequently expressed for Ham’s follies.
Unfortunately, these stats don’t look much different from what we’d get in Minnesota.
I’ve got my hands on a strange paper by D Kanduc: “Protein information content resides in rare peptide segments”. Here’s the abstract.
Discovering the informational rule(s) underlying structure-function relationships in the protein language is at the core of biology. Current theories have proven inadequate to explain the origins of biological information such as that found in nucleotide and amino acid sequences; an ‘intelligent design’ is now a popular way to explain the information produced in biological systems. Here, we demonstrate that the information content of an amino acid motif correlates with the motif rarity. A structured analysis of the scientific literature supports the theory that rare pentapeptide words have higher significance than more common pentapeptides in biological cell ‘talk’. This study expands on our previous research showing that the immunological information contained in an amino acid sequence is inversely related to the sequence frequency in the host proteome.
What? This is an intelligent design paper? How interesting. Unfortunately, the abstract is wrong, and ‘intelligent design’ is not a popular way to explain information in biological systems, and I read through the whole thing, and missed the part where it actually supports ID.
Here’s what the paper actually does: it dissects a sample protein and asks about the frequency of its components in the proteome. It looks specifically at calmodulin (CaM), an important and highly conserved protein that is involved in all kinds of developmental and physiological interactions. The rather arbitrary unit the protein is broken down into is 5 amino acid chunks, or pentapeptides, and each pentapeptide sequence is searched for in genes other than CaM. If this is the initial sequence of CaM,
MADQLTEE…
Then what Kanduc does is search the proteome for MADQL, ADQLT, DQLTE, etc., and count the number of times each appears. Rare pentapeptides are equated with high information content, and common ones are assigned low information content. Some pentapeptides, in his analysis, are found only in CaM, while others are found multiple times, with an average of 12 occurrences. This is supposed to be significant.
It’s also where he loses me. If you search a completely random string of amino acids for an arbitrary pentapeptide, it should turn up, on average, once in every 3,200,000 amino acids. If you search a long enough chunk of amino acid sequence, one that’s long enough to generate on average 12 hits, what you’d expect to see is a bell-shaped distribution — some pentapeptides may appear only once, while others appear dozens of times, just by chance. And that is what Kanduc sees. That some pentapeptides are unique to CaM is perhaps not too surprising, especially when you consider that the proteome is not a random sequence at all, but the product of frequent gene duplications and is also refined by selection.
So far, this idea that some pentapeptides will be rare and others common, is utterly uninteresting and unsurprising. I would have liked to have seen some consideration of the null hypothesis, that the distribution is due to chance alone, but that seems to be totally lacking. If I’d been reviewing the paper, I would have sent it back with a request for revisions to consider that possibility.
However, Kanduc does propose something that actually is interesting: that the rare pentapeptide sequences in specific genes also correlate with regions that have important functional roles.
Using the CaM features, attributes and annotations reported at www.uniprot.org/uniprot/P62158, we find that modification sites, structural beta strand motifs, functional domains, and epitopic determinants are confined primarily to areas of low similarity with the human proteome.
Now that’s kind of cool, if true. It’s also a bit unsurprising. He does examine the length of the CaM protein and show that rare pentapeptide regions are also sites for for acetylation, ubiquitylation, and phosphorylation, and also at the calcium binding site, for instance; but these are functional regions of the protein where one would expect some selection for specific properties. We get a different analysis, in which naturally occurring pentapeptide fragments that are known to have significant biological activity are searched for in the human proteome, and found to be fairly rare. Again, this might be an expected result explained by selection — after all, a sequence that can trigger apoptosis might be expected to be confined by selection to a limited range of sites — and don’t seem to me to require postulating an intelligent designer.
As a paper that hints at some possible functional correlations in the proteome, it’s mildly diverting. It’s weak in that it doesn’t address the null hypothesis very well — I get the impression the author is more interested in fishing for correlations than in actually testing his hypothesis. Where it starts triggering alarm bells, though, is the shoutout to creationists. Kanduc says this about CaM:
…the CaM sequence is characterised by both specificity and complexity (what information theorists call ‘specified complexity’); in other words, it has ‘information content’.
Uh-oh. “Specified complexity” is a meaningless phrase; the creationists have not defined how to measure “specification”. In this case, Kanduc hasn’t either, and his criterion for calling it “specified complexity” is that CaM has various functional domains, which is kind of expected for a protein that has functions. I find it interesting, too, that he doesn’t provide a citation for his claim — Dembski doesn’t get an acknowledgment. Probably because it would be a too-obvious hint about where in looney-land this idea is coming from, and because Dembski doesn’t bother to explain how to calculate “specified complexity” either.
Also, there’s something suspicious about the phrasing there — it seems to be straight out of Meyer 2000:
Systems that are characterized by both specificity and complexity
(what information theorists call “specified complexity”) have
“information content”.
Hmmmmm. (Thanks to Blake Stacey for picking up on that identity.)
Another problem with the paper is the conclusion, which is some unholy amalgam of a dog’s breakfast and a word salad, and either way is grossly unappetizing.
Researchers in the fields of biology and immunology need to define objective informational entities and reductionist basic laws that are valid everywhere and for everything. As new objects and scientific laws are absorbed into experimental protocols and reports, abstract terms such as “sense”, “edit”, and “attack” as well as old dogmas such as the self/non-self dichotomy will become obsolete in favour of more intelligible and concrete theories and biological activities. This process will enable the effective translational application of science to medicine.
What the heck does that mean? What does it have to do with the rest of the paper? Again, if I’d been reviewing it, that would have gone back with a recommendation to delete the gobbledygook and write a conclusion that actually makes sense in the light of the rest of the paper.
What we have here is yet another case of poor reviewing and editing. There is a germ of an interesting observation in the work that the author fails to examine critically and convincingly, but the main intent seems to be to inject the words “intelligent design” into a reviewed scientific paper (while failing to justify why that is a useful hypothesis) and for the author to ride some obscure immunological hobbyhorse which is also not addressed by any of the data. It’s remarkably sloppy work that should have been sent back for extensive revision, rather than being published as is.
I do notice that it was received at Peptides on 20 January, and then bounced back and accepted after what must have been only minor revisions only two weeks later. The journal is commendably fast in its turnaround, but this looks like a case where haste just churned up the garbage a bit more.
Kanduc D. Protein information content resides in rare peptide segments, Peptides (2008), doi:10.1016/j.peptides.2010.02.003
